News

One September morning . . .

If surveys conducted by physician recruiting companies accurately reflect current trends in the job market, the news is very good for psychiatrists-and less promising for many patients with mental health disorders.

The most disturbing turbulence at the boundary between psychiatry and the law is the misuse of a makeshift psychiatric diagnosis to justify the involuntary, indefinite psychiatric commitment of rapists. This is a disguised form of preventive detention and an abuse of psychiatry.

There are very real concerns about the miners’ mental well-being. Chile’s Health Minister reported that five of the men were not eating properly and refused to be filmed. In the meantime, a team of nutritionists and psychologists have been assembled to monitor their physical and mental states.

Just imagine. If you are not a transgender individual, what must it feel like to always think, as far back as you may remember, that you should have the body of the opposite gender? That you were “born in the wrong body”.

Pediatrician Sandy L. Chung on getting schooled in the business of medicine during her first year of practice.

Which antidepressants are associated with the highest rates of sexual dysfunction in patients treated for depression? This and more in this week's quiz.

Are psychiatrists agents of the police or doctors who care for the sick? Thomas Szasz raised this question 50 years ago in his iconic “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Psychiatry has changed in the ensuing decades, but Szasz’ question is still relevant. Why?

Embracing part-time and work-at-home schedules to help fit the right medical practice employee pieces into place.

A Federal appeals court has supported an earlier ruling by a lower court that established the unconstitutionality of gassing disruptive mentally ill inmates in their cells.

The challenge of new technology - as in the example of robot-assisted surgery - is that costly innovations often become the standard of care before there’s sufficient evidence to tell whether they add real value that justifies their expense.

Although Charles O’Brien, MD, who heads the substance-related disorders work group, is a vigorous proponent of the notion of addiction as a disease, nothing about the proposed DSM-5 substance-related disorders section supports the idea that the syndrome is best understood as a chronic brain disease.

My colleague Allen Frances is rightly concerned with the risk of over-calling normal grief as major depression - - that is, the risk of "false positives" - - if the DSM-IV "bereavement exclusion" is dropped in the DSM-5 while the 2-week minimum duration criterion is retained.

Before jumping the gun to a premature and potentially harmful diagnosis, why not watchfully wait a few more weeks to determine if the grief is severe and enduring enough to warrant the label of mental disorder.

In a recent study of 2 randomized groups of healthy participants, Research confirmed what many have suspected-that yoga has positive effects on mood over other physical activities.

In reading fiction, we often find very interesting characters, which we suspect may have a psychiatric disorder-whether this is intentional on the part of the author, we’re not sure. As practicing psychiatrists, you are the experts on what ails some of these characters. So, tell us what your take is. If this were someone who came to see you, what would be your diagnosis?

In the debates around DSM-5, a central figure has been Allen Frances, whose views seem to elicit sympathy from many unhappy with the DSM system (the 4th edition of which Dr. Frances led).

According to the 2009 Roundtable on Bipolar Disorder in Children and Adolescents, a diagnosis of pediatric bipolar I disorder should be considered dependent on what factors? This and more in this week's quiz.

Looking for the Land of Smiling Physicians? Our “traffic light guide” to state-level data on conditions affecting physicians’ wallets should help. For each state, we present numbers on cost of living, Medicare pay, taxes, malpractice premiums, and more…

This book aims to demonstrate how, regrettably, over the last twenty years or so, typically American conceptions of mental illness have been exported successfully to the rest of the world. According to Watters, the often enthusiastic international reception of DSM-III and IV has homogenized human suffering all over the world.

Any effort to develop a diagnostic manual for world-wide use must grapple with the question of cross-cultural applicability. The description and diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia must work as well in East Timor as in the US or France. In this piece I choose PTSD to show the complexity of the cultural issue for DSM-5.